Over the past couple days you may have noticed that our friendly @shinobu@ani.social had not been posting episode discussion threads. The reasons for this can be traced back to a breaking api change on an external website (see here, here, and here for more info). Well, thanks to the work of @chaorace@lemmy.sdf.org , our friendly neighborhood Shinobu is back (sans polls).
However, I thought this might be a good opportunity to gauge the community’s feelings about automated episode discussion posts. The fact of the matter is that our community at !anime@lemmy.ml is not as big or active as the anime subreddit that the bot was designed for. Most of Shinobu’s episode discussion threads spend their whole lives without ever receiving a single comment.
It makes me wonder if, because of the smaller size of our community, should Shinobu not make posts for shows that the people here aren’t really watching/commenting on? Perhaps Shinobu is limited to only posting threads for shows in which the threads have been active? At the moment, there is no automated way of enabling/disabling shows in this way, but it could likely be done manually with some sqlite database tinkering (I say as somebody not running/maintaining the bot).
I am not a mod or the maintainer of the bot, simply an interested party wanting to get others opinions that are active in this community.
As others have said, I’d probably not post at all if there’s no automated post. I like them and lurk frequently, but also agree there’s too many with zero participation. Either a cutoff of 5-10 shows that are the highest popularity or simply cutting a show after 1-2 weeks of zero comments would simplify it well.
I’d also add another recommendation here that might help with participation. I’m frequently watching older shows or stuff that’s a few weeks behind. Would anybody be interested in a weekly general “what did you watch this week and what did you think of it” thread?
I agree that a weekly pinned thread where non-seasonal anime could be discussed would be great. I also watch some older shows and there isn’t anywhere in this community currently to discuss them other than just creating a new post; which a lot of people like yourself tend to find a high barrier to entry.
It helps me personally to not have to make a post myself to comment on a show.
I’m okay with a bot posting episodes for popular series (which are guaranteed to have comments), but the abundance of zero comment discussion posts benefits no one. I propose we limit shinobot to top 10-15-20 popular series per season (by MAL followers or we can vote before the season starts). Anything else can be posted manually (it’s very simple anyway - go to /r/anime and copy the source text for the episode discussion, replace or remove one /r/community link and optionally link past discussions).
FWIW: I think anything we can do to increase discussion will be a boon to the community. That’s why we collectively wanted an episode discussion bot in the first place, after all. With that being said, we probably overshot it. Rather than making it easier for everyone to join the discussion, we ended up spreading out the discussion too thinly. It’s a sort of ghost-town effect.
So, what next? Well, I still believe in automation, though I think we need to redo it in a way that better fits the current size of the community. We should start small and build that back out until such a point that we can actually justify the one-episode-one-thread model. How do we do that? That’s up to you guys, but here’s a proposal to consider:
- Every day, an episode discussion thread gets automatically posted covering all episodes which aired that day
- On that thread, a poll is posted for people to vote on the best episode of the day
- On an as-needed basis, if a show is so popular that the other episodes are getting crowded out, then we give those shows their own dedicated threads in the style of the current bot
What do you folks think? I’m very open to thoughts & suggestions
1 thread for all episodes of that day? That doesn’t sound like a great idea tbh.
It’s hard to have a proper discussion when everyone’s talking about multiple things at the same time and others might see things about an episode of another anime they’ve not watched yet, possibly being spoilered because of it. Unless you don’t want spoilers but that kinda defeats the point of an episode thread doesn’t it?
It might be better to have a poll before the new season starts and then make episode threads based on that?
That’s a good point! Now that I realize the spoiler implications… I’m suddenly a lot less happy with the original concept. With that being said, I don’t feel that leaving it up to a pre-season poll is an ideal solution either. Lots of strong-looking shows drop off hard and lots of the season’s best start out as dark horses – most of the time, I think that we’d end up preventing more active discussions than we’d actually be bringing back. Theoretically, we could try to solve this with a recurring poll, but I’m skeptical of doing that because: A) poll participation suffers from selection bias & B) flooding the feed with repeated poll threads would be even worse than simply sending out a bunch of empty discussion threads.
I apologize for claiming to be open to thoughts and then immediately shooting down that one… so let me at least conjure up an important takeaway from it: the best possible solution to the problem is one that – no matter which show you choose – you can still find a place discuss the latest episode of it somewhere. I think that’s important because it keeps us out of the business of gatekeeping and creates the kind of cross-pollination opportunities that many of us want out of an online anime community (i.e.: you can discover cool shows as they’re airing because fans are talking about it in the same shared space).
With that being said, if I had to structure an ordered list of priorities, it’d look like this:
- Minimize “spillover” spoilers between ongoing series
- Maximize per thread feed impact (i.e.: the only acceptable feed spam is good content)
- Maximize discoverability / cross-polination
I like the idea of merging threads because it boosts objectives 2 & 3, but objective 1 takes precedence. Could we somehow have our cake and eat it too? For example: /r/anime has their spoiler corner subthreads which start autocollapsed. Lemmy doesn’t support this (yet), but perhaps there are alternative solutions if we get clever enough?
I agree that a poll isn’t the most ideal, but it’s the simplest I feel like. Overcomplicating it is even less ideal.
think that we’d end up preventing more active discussions than we’d actually be bringing back.
This I don’t agree with. It’s not like people aren’t allowed to make their own threads. If it seems like there’s a sleeper hit, and user created episode threads for said hit are very active and reoccuring, then automate it. Of course, that requires a pretty active someone to keep a lookout for that.
flooding the feed with repeated poll threads would be even worse than simply sending out a bunch of empty discussion threads.
Why would it be flooded? You don’t have to do the poll that frequently. If you redo the poll midway through the season, wouldn’t that be enough? Or maybe after about 3-4 weeks, when for most anime, 3-4 episodes should be out.
I thought that this moment might be a good point to ask peoples’ opinions because of the temporary outage so that people saw what it might be like without the bot. I personally agree with you that automation can be beneficial and help facilitate community involvement. Also personally, I think that the current Shinobu is great, but wanted to see what others thought.
Thanks again for the hard work of keeping our Shinobu running.
Err… there’s really no need to explain yourself. You’re just voicing what everyone else was already thinking, including me!
For the purposes of this thread please just think of me like any other member of the community. That guy who deals with the bot upkeep may as well be someone else entirely 😉
On the one hand, if they’re not getting used then it may be better to get rid of them as they’ll clog up the community with threads people have no interest in.
On the other hand, how do we decide which ones to allow and which to filter out? If we only use shows that have previously prompted discussion then that prevents a show from being talked about if it only becomes more popular later on in a season.
One alternative is to only have a thread per show’s season. This would greatly reduce the amount of unused clutter in this community and could be a decent stopgap until this community attracts a large enough userbase to necessitate weekly threads. The only thing I don’t like about this idea is if a season runs a pretty long episode count, it may become harder to find in the list, and if someone starts an anime partway through its season then they may have to deal with spoilers if they come here to discuss it.
I see what you are saying. The one thread/season would definitely cause some spoiler issues unless there were some strict moderation. Your idea caused me to think of something like a pinned megathread with actively airing shows and their episode thread links in a table. Then, you could have the bot post the discussion threads to a separate, dedicated, bot-run community that houses all the automated threads. This would leave /c/anime more clutter-free, even if there is little activity on a lot of shows.
For example, the megathread could have something like this for the actively airing shows:
Helck
| Episode | Link to Post |
|---|---|
| 1 | Link |
| 2 | Link |
| 3 | Link |
| 4 | Link |
| 5 | Link |
| 6 | Link |
| 7 | Link |
| 8 | Link |
| 9 | Link |
| 10 | Link |
| 11 | Link |
| 12 | Link |
| 13 | Link |
Also, just found out that this table does not render correctly in Jerboa on mobile. So, that might be an issue for something like this.
